But this is not all. We have seen what the Committee of the House of Commons decided. The Government—the proper, and the only proper agents, in a prosecution of this kind, upon whom, if sufficient ground existed, it was a bounden duty to have taken it in hand—seem to have treated the matter in the same manner as the Committee. All the documents which have been received in evidence, and some which were offered and were not received by the Court—that, in short, which forms all the evidence against the accused at the trial, and more, were in possession of Government before the last Administration went out (the proceedings before the Committee alone excepted)—that Administration did not take up the prosecution. The law-officers of the present Administration have had them also, and moreover the proceedings before the Committee, one of the members of which was a leading member of the preceding Government—they have not taken up the prosecution. A print in the favour and confidence, as it seems, of the parties to the late proceedings, has stated, that the actual law-officers of the Government were consulted and decided against their being undertaken; that again, when the bill was found by the Grand Jury, the prosecution was offered to them, but that they declined to be parties to it. These statements are followed up by remarks upon the apathy and indifference of the Government, which can only serve to render the testimony borne to the fact the more unexceptionable, because unwilling; for, otherwise, they afford only a lamentable specimen of how much mischief is done to a cause, the sole merit of which must consist in its being one purely of humanity, by its being used for the purposes of political warfare. This indeed is to trade with the cause of the slave.
The fact remains unshaken, that neither the Attorney-General of the present nor of the late Administration has prosecuted by himself or by others, and therefore the Queen’s name was as much usurped under the cover of the forms of the Court, as that of the public, whose name is invoked in support of these proceedings. I will venture to say, that no one who has really looked into them for himself, and is possessed of all the facts from the examination before the Committee of the House of Commons, can think with other feelings than those of shame and indignation, that they can take place in England—feelings, the more strong, because such proceedings are pretended to be undertaken in order to serve a cause with which, if they are identified, they will only serve to disgrace it. I cannot but believe that all this is felt by the majority (I know it is felt by very many) of the members of a society, whose zeal may be imposed upon at times, but the majority of whom must have that real benevolence of heart and soundness of judgment, which will make them wish for no other principle of action than that contained in the well-expressed sentiments of a noble lord—“That a good, however eminent, should not be attained otherwise than by lawful means[1]:” it may be added, that by no other can it be permanently attained.
[1] Lord Aberdeen’s Letter to the Lords of the Admiralty, 20th May, 1842.
The Society, to which I am alluding, was not more eager to start or to adopt the prosecution than the Committee of the House of Commons disposed to find a ground for its being undertaken, or than the last and the present Administration; indeed, the Society volunteered a disavowal of any connexion with the proceedings at their commencement, and did not express even an approval of them. In this, their organ only represented faintly the sentiments more strongly and decidedly repeated to myself by many members of that Society in a tone of unequivocal reprobation, and viewing the proceedings as calculated only to injure the cause which they had at heart. That such has been a very generally prevailing impression is fully attested by the plaintive remarks of the organs of the prosecution, and the libellous stimulants which, whilst the proceedings for the trial were in progress, they thought it necessary to apply. It is, indeed, but too true that a society, proposing to itself the accomplishment of some great moral and benevolent object, is most specially bound to confine itself to the use of such means only as are of as unexceptionable and even as benevolent a character as the end. Crime is, indeed, a just object of abhorrence; but a society, like the Anti-Slavery Society, is specially bound to guard themselves against the danger of encouraging one species of crime in their attempt to put down another; every one of the means they employ or sanction must be of as unquestionable purity as the end they profess to aim at: expediency, as distinct from justice, must be jealously guarded against, apt as it is to insinuate itself into all human proceedings, and never more subtilely than under the cloak of zeal in a good, cause: the smallest degree of evil to be done must stand as an insurmountable barrier to the accomplishment of the most undoubted good. It is in the power of man to destroy the very end in view, whilst he thinks he is advancing it; but he cannot alter the law of Providence, which dooms to certain defeat, even amidst the tokens of apparent triumph, whomsoever dares to modify for himself the moral code of the universe: the moment that violent hands are laid upon it, in order to smooth down a difficulty in the way of action, the very end itself becomes contaminated. All this is evident enough, and approves itself to the enlightened conscience. A society, as a body, taken in the abstract, may be supposed less likely to be led away by such apparently short cuts when presenting themselves in their path; but these societies are, in practice, managed by individuals of whom the least scrupulous are sure to appear as the most zealous and most efficient—they are the most busy and the most forward—and, hence, the additional necessity for caution on the part of the more conscientious, inasmuch as the names of the good are too often the cover of the deeds of the bad, whose power consists exclusively in the moral weight attached to the acts which the good are made to appear as having sanctioned.
It would have been well for the credit of the Anti-Slavery Society, therefore, if the London Committee had retained the position in which they placed themselves by their own act of disavowal; instead of which, after being taunted by one or two prints, which have, pending the proceedings, used every exertion in their limited power to stimulate the passions of those whose good sense it was necessary to mislead, the London Committee have passed and published the following resolution:—
“At a meeting of the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, held at No. 27, New Broad Street, London, on Friday, December 8, 1843, Josiah Forster in the Chair,—The conduct of Sir George Stephen, in the prosecution of Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., in October last, being taken into consideration, the following resolution was unanimously adopted—
“That this Committee feel it to be due alike to Sir George Stephen himself, and the public interests of justice and humanity, to express their high sense of his philanthropic and public spirited conduct, in carrying on, upon his own responsibility, the prosecution of Pedro de Zulueta, Jun., and another, for slave trading; a course in which the decision of the Grand Jury, and the declared opinion of the Judge, have fully sustained him, and by which it may be hoped a salutary check will be given to the notorious implication of British capital and commerce in that nefarious traffic. Josiah Forster, Chairman.”
Here, after using that description of the charge, which is calculated to convey a false notion of what was, and could alone, even by the worst construction and perversion, be imputed, as if the charge had been dealing in slaves, they express a high sense of the philanthropic and public spirited conduct of the prosecutor—necessarily including the inquisitorial proceeding before the Grand Jury—the mode of apprehension of the accused—the resistance to his being released on even large bail, and to his having time given him to prepare his defence—the shrinking from appearing as a witness in public, and stating there what he, the prosecutor, had been ready to swear before the Grand Jury—the bringing up of a witness to raise an appearance of the existence of facts, the very contrary of which had been deposed to before the Committee of the House of Commons by the leading witness for the prosecution in Court—all this forms that conduct, which must have been taken into the consideration of a committee of a benevolent society, and which in discharge of a duty of both justice and humanity that committee have pronounced as both philanthropic and public spirited.
The resolution proceeds to state, that in the course adopted by the prosecutor he has been fully supported by the decision of the Grand Jury and the declared opinion of the Judge. It is impossible to estimate what value to attach to the finding of a Grand Jury without knowing upon what evidence their finding was based. In the present case, one fact is beyond all dispute, viz. that Sir George Stephen appeared before the Grand Jury as the first witness, his name standing as such on the back of the indictment, and that he did not present himself in the witness-box at the public trial, although in Court from the beginning to the close of it—from which it results, that the Grand Jury had before them a witness, giving to them in private, evidence which he did not think proper to give in public. Must not the inference be permitted, that the Grand Jury would have thrown out the bill, as the Petty Jury threw out the indictment, unless some evidence, which was not offered to the latter, had been given to the former by a witness, and that too, unfortunately, by a witness who seems to have preferred the secret inquisitorial form, which still remains in British law, to the open and public path which was before him, and which is the proper boast of British justice?
Regarding the support derived from the expressions of Judge Maule, when applied to by Serjeant Bompas for an order for the payment of the expenses of the prosecution, it is not for me to speak; but that it does not extend to a sanction, in point of propriety, to the part taken by the prosecutor, nor to the manner in which he has discharged it, is very obvious.